Theresa May’s new proposals to crack down on boardroom excess and rebuild trust between corporate Britain and voters have received a mixed reaction from business leaders.

The moves, announced by the incoming prime minister just minutes before her rival, Andrea Leadsom, pulled out of the leadership contest, include allowing employee and consumer representatives to sit on company boards, and making shareholder votes on executive pay legally binding. “It is not anti-business to suggest that big business needs to change,” she said.

However, Josh Hardie, deputy director general of the Confederation of British Industry, gave May’s plans a lukewarm response on behalf of the big business lobby.

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He said: “Changes to pay reporting rules that have already taken place, including a binding shareholder vote on executive pay policies, have struck a good balance ... To ensure the most effective proposals are considered, it’s important that issues – such as putting employees on boards, whether they would need to sit on the full board, and how they would use their voting rights – are discussed between the government and business.”

A leading figure in the retail and consumer industry, who did not want to be named, added: “On what basis can a prime minister, who has no popular acclamation either through party members or a general election, pursue policies unconnected to the manifesto on which her party was elected? How contractually will binding votes on pay work? Look at what happened with employee representatives at the Co-op.”

Another said: “Look, she gave a speech in the morning that was a campaign speech, and when she sat down she was prime minister. Bloody hell.”

Joe Kaeser, chief executive of Siemens, where 50% of the supervisory board is made up of employee representatives. Photograph: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images

Others, who have personal experience of boardroom employee representatives, warned of potential pitfalls.

Joe Kaeser, the chief executive of engineering multinational Siemens and whose supervisory board consists of 50% employee representatives, said: “In Germany we’ve seen companies where workers’ representatives thought they co-managed the company – that obviously is a bit too much ... You need to get used to it but if it’s being practised well it has its benefits.

“A board member needs to act in the best interests of [his or her] company no matter which region they are from. So if you have workers’ representatives that are hypothetically from the UK, they also need to act in the best interests of the company if [the issue] is about job cuts in the UK and creating new jobs in China because demand has shifted. This typically puts quite a strain on the workers’ representatives.”

May’s speech on Monday echoed several corporate responsibility themes championed by the former Labour leader Ed Miliband during the 2015 election campaign and came after a EU referendum result that many viewed as a protest over inequality in the UK.

Sir Mike Rake, the chairman of BT and Worldpay, hinted that the attitude of business leaders might have changed since last year’s general election.

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“If you’d asked me 18 months ago I would have said business leaders were not at all receptive but there is now a huge awareness among people I speak to, who are mainly in the FTSE 100, that we need to do something about this gap,” he said. “It was shown in stereophonic sound in the referendum that there is a lack of trust in the establishment, politicians and business.”

Tim Martin, the chairman and founder of pubs chain JD Wetherspoon, added: “The current system is up the spout. It’s far too much of an old boys’ network. Boards need to be more aware of what consumers think and in most businesses like ours you need to be aware of what your employees think.

“Instinctively yes [it could work] as long as it doesn’t become a muddle. What has worked in Britain is we have got relatively high employment. What hasn’t worked in France [where they have employee representatives on boards] is moving to the other end of the spectrum and making the system too employer unfriendly.”

First Group, which has faced numerous shareholder revolts over executive pay in recent years, although without suffering absolute defeats, can claim at least to be a step ahead of May, whose constituency is served by its Great Western trains.

“In most of First Group’s UK businesses, bus and trains, an employee director chosen by the workforce is on the board, up to and including the group plc board – it’s a well-established practice,” a company spokesman said. “We’ve found it helpful to have an employees’ voice on the board.”